Review of:  The Search for God and Guinness  (by Stephen Mansfield)

Julia Casey

Business as a force for good is not a popular or common notion.  Often, business is seen as a source of social ills and in contradiction to faith.  Stephen Mansfield challenges this notion is his book The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World.

Stephen Mansfield is a celebrated historic and biographical writer that explores the role of faith in the lives of his subjects.  Mansfield has a bachelor’s degree in Theology, a master’s in Public Policy, and a Doctorate in History.

Mansfield’s work, The Search for God and Guinness, traces the lives of the generations of the Guinness family most widely known for establishing the Guinness brewing empire.  It is primarily set in Dublin, Ireland where the Guinness brewing business was founded.  Throughout the time this book covers, Ireland was a place of extreme poverty and rampant social, political, and religious unrest.

In The Search for God and Guinness, Mansfield uses the Guinness story to present the idea that business is an act of faith through a calling from God and that this calling is not exclusive to entrepreneurs but can span across generations.  While I think Mansfield succeeded in illustrating this point through The Search for God and Guinness, his treats the Guinness story with rose-colored glasses in not presenting their shortcomings.

The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World describes the story and evolution of the Guinness brewing company and the Guinness family.  The author begins by describing the brewing process and its evolution.  The way Mansfield describes brewing makes one fall in love with this art form.  He writes, “He told me he felt closer to God brewing beer than he did in church, because when he is brewing he feels like he is participating in the secret ways of the creator (pg. 14).”  Mansfield then explores Christian attitudes toward beer before starting his description of the patriarch of the Guinness lineage, Arthur Guinness, and the generations that would follow.  Arthur Guinness was a deeply faithful Protestant heavily influenced John Wesley’s Methodist movement (pg. 62).  Arthur saw the heavy consumption of liquor and the resulting drunkenness as one of the foremost social ill of his time.  He felt God was calling him to create a healthy, nutritiously valuable drink for the masses – beer and, thus, stared a brewing company.

After depicting the life of Arthur Guinness and the founding of his brewing company as St. James’s Gates, Mansfield split the resulting generations into three categories: the brewing Guinness’s, the religious/missionary Guinness’s, and the banking Guinness’s.  Mansfield follows the brewing and religious Guinness’s most closely throughout the book and ends the Guinness saga in 1986 when Benjamin Guinness stepped down as chair and effectively ended the Guinness family reign of the Guinness brewing company.  Stephen Mansfield wraps up The Search for God and Guinness with three lessons that one should learn from the Guinness family legacy.  These three lessons include: to “discern the ways of God for life and business”, to “think of generations yet to come”, and “whatever else you do, do one thing very well” (pg. 254-257).

Stephen Mansfield creates an interesting and compelling story through The Search for God and Guinness.  He covers a lot of history while staying true to his theme.  However, the amount of history he covered results in a work that does not look critically at the Guinness’s and their legacy.  For example, he speaks of the missionary Guinness’s as almost heroic in their mission of proselytization without acknowledging or engaging in discussion about the negative externalities that these missions often caused (pgs. 155-200).  Additionally, Mansfield almost exclusively follows the males of the Guinness lineage with barely a nod to the female descendants and their roles within the three categories of the Guinness’s.  Given these critiques, I still found this novel absorbing.  I, particularly, like that the author outlines ways in which the Guinness’s provide relevant lessons to the reader’s life.

The Search for God and Guinness by Stephen Mansfield follows the legacy of the Guinness family from the patriarch’s establishment of the brewery through the generations.  Mansfield’s overarching theme throughout the book is that business combined with faith can have a positive impact that spans through generations.  Mansfield does not look critically at what negative impacts the Guinness family had.  He also fails to follow any of the female descendants of Arthur Guinness.  However, The Search for God and Guinness was a thoroughly entertaining read and made the lessons of history relevant to the present-day reader.

Works Cited

Mansfield, Stephen. The Search for God and Guiness: A Biography of the Beer that   Changed the World. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2009.